Snap, p.9
Snap, page 9
There once was a lady from China.
But he laid the little volume neatly on the stack and went on to the next. Since he felt high from a sugar rush, he was able to forget about time and how much of it he was wasting. He had not intended to spend his day like this. But the library was air-conditioned. Its giant windows were of black-smoked glass, and Ruby’s table had a slick, cool finish of the kind found on bars at seaside resorts, inlaid with coral fans, sea horses and pearly halves of oyster shells. The librarian was stamping dates on cards, with little thumps that could be felt more than heard. Even telephones sound different in libraries, a muzzled, far-off, bell-like silence that blends musically with the orchestrated peace.
So the rest of the world was a shock when at six o’clock he finally stepped into it, onto the sidewalks of University City, into the fierce sunlight. Some potholes had been filled on Del-mar, and the sharp tar smell accompanied him home. He walked quickly, past the galleries, past the laundry with its pale, blank interior, the piles of fresh clothing wrapped and tagged. University City had suddenly been gentrified, and people left their shirts to be pressed instead of standing on the sidewalk grubbing quarters while their blue jeans spun round.
Turning onto Westgate, Ruby dug in his pocket for money. He’d buy cheese and an apple from the bruised fruit bin, and maybe some unshelled nuts.
But the food co-op was gone. In its place was a bookshop decorated with gooseneck lamps. Ruby’s stomach rumbled. The bookshop door was open. He stared in at a cat asleep on a table of journals. In the far corner a fan whirred round and round and ruffled the animal’s marmalade coat. That same cat used to sleep in the co-op, spread out in a carton of muddy potatoes. Ruby, visiting from college, would stop in to pet it and buy dried apples for his mother. But that was ages ago. So, cats do have nine lives. Ruby knew how they did it, too. Sleep. Ruby wouldn’t eat dinner, he’d go home and sleep. Maybe on the porch with a beer, the chilled can slipping from his fingers, froth dissolving on his tongue. Yes. He stepped eagerly into the webby shade of the sidewalk and followed the curve to his mother’s house.
At the drive he paused, embarrassed, realizing he’d left his rented car in the library lot. Turning back, he walked to the alley and then stopped again, deciding to leave the car in the lot overnight and to get it in the morning. All he wanted was his beer and his mother’s chair, a director’s chair of purple canvas stapled precariously onto the frame so that a person sitting in it slung low to the ground. If he leaned back and shut his eyes and felt the summer breeze around his face, he was able to imagine himself dozing in his own hammock.
But there was someone in the chair. A frizzy Goldilocks. Oh. It was Linell, who’d looked after his mother’s house all winter and spring. Ruby wondered if that meant they were supposed to be friends. He thought of walking on by. He thought of crossing the street. He thought of going for the rented car after all, switching on the air conditioning, spending a night in the library lot, reading the newspaper.
The newspaper should be up on the porch. He’d bought one this morning and left it folded on the purple chair. He’d just step up, grab the paper, tell her he was meeting someone for dinner someplace and split. He’d get a beer at Blueberry Hill.
Linell was reading his paper. She was drinking one of his beers. She said, “Where have you been in this heat? I came to return your key. I love this porch. I love it. I love this chair. I love light beer. I never think of drinking it. If it’s around, that’s when I think of it.” She raised the can in his direction. She took a sip and lowered the can back down to rest on a jiggling knee.
Ruby didn’t get it. He walked right past her into the house, found a beer for himself and carried it out to the porch. He sat on the steps, opened the can and watched the head bubble out of the hole.
“Hot day,” he said. His stomach rumbled as he sucked in the froth.
“Not too hot for stealing buildings,” Linell said, looking up from his newspaper. She put her finger on some print and began to read. Her finger moved along. Ruby had always hated that habit. It reminded him of people who licked their fingertips before turning pages. But he liked the story, anyway. It made infinite sense. Thieves dismantled buildings and sold the salvaged bricks. Whole buildings collapsed and disappeared. St. Louis was losing buildings at a rate of five per week. Ruby chuckled. He’d never thought of a building as something that could simply be dismantled, piece by piece. His own mother’s house was made of bricks. Maybe tomorrow it would be gone.
Linell laid the paper down. “There’s not much else interesting happening,” she said. “My bicycle was stolen, you know. I got knocked off and I had to walk home through the park. At night, practically.”
To Ruby’s astonishment, she was crying, just like that, the way rain sometimes falls without warning, simply dropping from invisible clouds. Her face grew damp and streaky. Ruby sipped his beer, not knowing what was expected of him. Finally he fished a tissue from his pocket, making sure it was fresh. No matter how you lived it, he was thinking, life would not be simple. People got in the way, they did exasperating things, like crying.
Linell sniffled and coughed, he reached out to give her the tissue, she misunderstood, grabbed hold of his fingers, would not let go. How much time went by before he managed to extricate himself? An ice cream truck went by, and a squirrel ran past on a telephone wire, stopped midway, chattered and lost its balance. Then Ruby put the tissue on the stoop beside him, where a breeze picked it up and carried it into the yard. At that moment Linell gulped, wiped her eyes and asked for a tissue. Ruby went inside to get one. He thought of not going back out. He yanked off a length of his mother’s toilet paper printed with yellow vines and let the vines trail behind him as he walked to the porch. Then they both sipped their beers, while Linell told the tale of her stolen bike and failed exercise routine. She had not had a very good look at the boy, and even if they caught him, she wouldn’t press charges. She had better things to do than sit around in court. Like what, Ruby wondered. He would not mow the lawn, he decided. Let it sprout up like a prairie, seed tops undulating in continuous waves. Autumnal colors, too, not this bleached-out summer stuff. He likes the blending of the mellow browns and yellows, the dulling green of the marshes along the highways in Virginia. He likes the look of dried weeds in tall earthenware jars adorning the doorways in Colonial Williamsburg. He likes the bare fields overrun with flocks of sheep, the inns adorned with candle flames and cranberry wreaths, the smells of lemon cakes, peanut soup and oyster stew.
Ruby was homesick, for sure. Who wouldn’t be? In Williamsburg, seasons altered with a sudden, primitive brilliance, like movie sets. Ida in autumn, burrs in her sweater. Ida in a down coat, her eyes wet from cold, wiping her nose on her sleeve. In spring, cut grass stuck in her hair and collar. In summer, bronzed Ida in a T-shirt, braless, bending to look at the flowers.
Here in St. Louis the seasons were vague. Winter froze and then melted, melted and froze. In March, the snow stayed muddy at the edges of the sidewalks. In May, new flowers wilted the moment they unfolded. Linell demonstrated how her new summer perm had flattened into limp, sad ripples, lifting a tendril of hair and then letting it flop, not once but twice. She said she missed her bicycle as if it were a friend. A ten speed. A Schwinn. Emerald green with copper racing stripes, white walls, a good chain lock for which she still had the key; she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. She held it out for him to see. It was cheap as a pop top. Somehow she let go and it fell between the porch slats. Ruby had to crawl under the porch, among damp leaf skeletons and fragments of red clay geranium pots. How hungry he was, so suddenly, an abnormal hunger like a yawning, sucking hole. His stomach thundered. He could not find the key but kept imagining its slim, flimsy substance under his fingers. Cats used to fuck down here. His belt loop snagged on a coat hanger, and he bumped his knee on a hunk of cement. From above him, on the porch, Linell invited him to dinner. He pretended not to hear so she asked him again. She said she’d made a stroganoff, egg noodles, garlic bread, chef salad, chocolate cake, and that the table was already set, and that she had a good bottle of wine. She said come to think of it the key was not important, she could live without it. So why didn’t he just forget about it and come across the street with her and eat.
So, he went.
So, here he is. Talking his head off, as if talking were a way of reaffirming life, a way of having what you want and getting rid of what you don’t. A sort of lilting confession, although he’s done nothing wrong. “People often wonder if I’m gay,” he admits. Ida was drawn to him for that very reason, and that’s one of their problems, he says, “because I’m not.” Maybe it s the peppercorns, making him go on. They’re floating whole in the stroganoff, little hot, black, invigorating globes. Linell, he sees, has eaten almost none of her food. She sits across from him with her elbows on the table and her chin in the upright palms of her hands. Her eyes look moist, starry. Behind her chair, on the buffet along with the empty salad bowl and the wine bottle sits a giant cage with a bird inside. The bird is white with yellow plumes, orange eyes, a heavy orange beak. It’s a hot bird, Linell explains, contraband, a gift from a friend of her ex-husband. The bird was drugged, stuffed along with its relatives into the lining of the smuggler’s overcoat, stowed in the overhead compartment of an airplane for a twenty-hour flight. The trip was traumatic; the bird no longer speaks. Linell does not remember what it used to be able to say. Now her ex-husband, Barry, wants it back. He means to sell it for twelve hundred dollars to some actor in California.
They both stare at the bird, at its reproachful orange eyes ringed in delicate blue and its heavy, clamped beak and reptilian feet. How restless it is, inching along on its various perches, nibbling here and there on the white wicker curlicues decorating its cage.
“He wants the Persian carpets, too,” says Linell, “so I rolled them up and put them in the basement. They’ll get totally moldy.”
Ruby fidgets. The evening must be coming to some kind of a close. He’s been talking all night, and now Linell is butting in, winding things down. And his food is gone; he must have eaten without thinking. His plate is empty. He feels satiated and a little queasy.
“I’m sorry,” he interrupts. “I apologize. I shouldn’t talk about myself. I don’t know what got into me. I drank too much. I don’t drink a hell of a lot. I really like being drunk, though. Not rowdy drunk. I really like talking like this. I really appreciate the fact that you’re listening. Do you mind? Really?”
Linell pours him another glass of wine.
Ruby raises the glass and drinks. “I ought to go home. I’m drunk. I never talk about myself like this. I like myself. I mean, I like talking about myself. I hope you don’t mind. You must wish I’d go home. Do you?”
He pulls himself clumsily up from his chair. He is not really drunk, but he wants to believe that he is.
Linell runs the tines of her fork along the ice cream melting on her plate, then lifts it to her mouth and delicately licks.
Now Ruby stands in Linel’s front hallway in the dark, waiting while she searches for and fumbles with the light switch. Alert, he thinks lucidly of sleep. He’s been spending the nights in his own old room, on a too-small bed in a nest of familiar sheets. The pillowcase is printed with willows, and he longs to lay his head on it and just let go. But something is amiss, and he is not yet sure what it is. He is sure that he ought to be making some move, in some direction, that’s all. Now he coughs uncomfortably in the shadowy hallway. When the light comes on he blinks, and rocks himself on the balls of his naked feet. Linel’s hall is like his mother’s, gracious in the old St. Louis style: high ceilings, leaded windows lit from behind by the porch lights, and up the length of the narrow stairway a threadbare runner still showing its rich design. The banister is sculpted mahogany, the floor a cool array of white stone tiles inlaid with black. The carved door is heavy, its upper half inset with tall rectangles of dense, beveled glass. Outside is the seedy grace of the university neighborhood: the alleyways that run between the houses, the cats on the fences, the inexpertly tended gardens, the ivy, the birdbaths, the feeders, the mossy stone slab porches hung with spider plants, on the stoops the tipped flower pots foggy with moisture. All the houses are of brick, and the bricks are a deep, rich, gritty red hue. Later tonight they will all disappear, carted off in burlap sacks in the bed of a truck. Come daybreak, what will remain? A few overturned toys, some stacks of newspapers waiting to be recycled, mushrooms growing in the damp, blackened holes where the chimneys had stood. Ruby is surprised to think he wouldn’t really care, and that he doesn’t really care about that, either. He would just go back to sleep, thrust his head under the pillows and dream of Williamsburg.
Linell still has a hand on the light switch. In the other she holds one of Ruby’s shoes.
“One, anyway,” she says. “I don’t see the other. What did you do with it? You must have kicked it into the closet.”
She squats to her knees and peers into the closet for what seems like much longer than necessary, as if searching for a contact lens rather than a shoe. Ruby stares at her ass in its purple sweat pants.
Another warm body.
“Maybe in the dining room,” he suggests.
“Maybe under the rug?” she says later, after they’ve looked behind the buffet, and in the kitchen, behind the oven.
“I don’t know what you could have done with it. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”
Ruby shrugs.
“Maybe the cat brought it upstairs.’
“I didn’t know you had a cat.”
“I guess we should look under the bed. Why don’t you come on up?”
Linell takes his arm, leads him to the base of the stairway, slides her hand to his shoulder and with her free hand removes her mules, practically kneeing him in the balls. If he weren’t so polite he might push her away. Instead he cups her elbow as she balances first on one foot and then on the other, murmuring about not letting him go home without his missing shoe. He holds the mate in the crook of his finger. The shoe is one of his black cloth Chinese slippers, which Ida must have slid into a corner of his suitcase while he packed, just three days earlier. Ida had folded the pair like lovers, belly to belly, tongue to heel.
Ruby pulls away and tripping on Linel’s mules guides himself hurriedly toward her front door, as if that’s where he’s been headed since the evening began. When he turns to say good night, she is looking not at him but at the Chinese slipper swinging from his fingertip. Then he is gone, following cool flagstone to the pavement and then, on the damp grass island dividing the road between their houses, standing still to let a car pass by.
The presence of the car amuses him, because it shouldn’t be there, at this hour when the streets are dark and empty, at this very moment when he is ready to step out into the street. And yet here it comes, steady as a glider, silver, impeding his crossing. Its window is open, and a strain of rock music floats vaguely after it. Ruby stands there waiting for the notes to dissolve. The song is unfamiliar, yet the strains of its brief passage make him nostalgic.
For a moment he is oddly, fantastically aroused.
But Ida is having an affair, with whom he doesn’t know. And Linell keeps calling him Ruben, or Reuben, like the sandwich. He will go home and brood, before bed. He will brood, and not paint the hallway. He will brood, and not sand the empty bookshelves, and not paint them white, and brood, and ignore the rusty hardware on his mother’s casement windows, and brood, and not even sleep.
He looks at his watch; it reads 12:34. A year ago those numbers would have turned him on. Life used to be so easy. Now it’s not. What better thing to brood about?
8
FROM HER BEDROOM WINDOW, Linell can look across the street through a crisscrossing of trees and watch Ruby Mack at work in his dead mother’s house.
She has taken to calling him Ruben, only to his face, because he seems not to mind, and because she hopes to make him recall, if fleetingly and unawares, the painter Rubens’s Three Graces. How white and delicious their copious bodies, circling naked beneath garlands of roses. How they pinch each other’s shoulders as they dance, and how a length of gauzy silk winds among their thighs as they circle and converse. In those days a woman was expected to be fat, or if not fat, doughy, with spreading hips, puckered bottom and wrists like squeezed dimples.
Somewhere in downtown St. Louis is a billboard Linell used to pass on her way back from Amighetti’s bakery, where before starting her diet she ate lunch in the red brick courtyard while listening to piped in accordian music. After lunch she’d throw a penny in the splashing fountain, slide into her car and drive north on Kingshighway toward the hospital where she worked. The billboard, for Anheuser-Busch, was the kind on which images flickered as you drove past. Behind the logo danced popping bubbles of a transparent amber, like a geyser of frothing beer. The bubbles rose and popped, spilled and rose again. One unsuspecting glance was enough to make a person want a beer more than anything, and since the hospital served no beer, Linell kept wanting one, intermittently, all day long. At the end of the day she’d forgotten the billboard but never the thirst, and it is this kind of trick that she intends to play on Ruby. Make him want her without knowing why. Make him hunger for her rounded neck and shoulders, their substance all flesh, no bone. Then she’ll have a fighting chance.
But she’s seen his wife, that little Ida. Like a feather pulled from a wing — all stem and barbs and downy stuff, like she’d float away in a minute if he let go. Well then, make him let go. Fatten him up, for starters. Perhaps they can reach some compromise. If Linell loses twenty pounds and Ruby gains ten, that ought to make a cozy beginning.
